3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Godzilla Minus One

2023,  Takashi Yamazaki (Lupin III: The First) -- download

I admit, I had been excitedly awaiting for this one to appear on some sort of media so I could download it. I missed seeing it with Kent in the cinema. To Kent's post, its a tempered "I Agree". Suffice to say, I was not as appreciative of the movie as Kent was, but likely for two reasons: I did not see it on the Big Screen, and I am most definitely not as steeped in the actual Japanese pantheon of Godzilla movies as Kent is.

The end of WWII, kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki, XxxHolic) feigns engine trouble and lands on a repair island. The engineers are not able to find any trouble and accuse the pilot of cowardice. That night, as they sleep Godzilla, a local legendary sea creature, walks ashore and kills most of them. Well, a much smaller version of him than we are used to. Shikishima could have stopped the creature by climbing into his plane and shooting it with its guns but he cowers; everyone but him and the lead mechanic die.

Later, he returns to his home in Tokyo to find it all but destroyed and his parents dead. This is not Nagasaki or Hiroshima, but the city did get hit by bombing raids. He ends up taking in a homeless woman (Minami Hamabe, Let Me Eat Your Pancreas) and her child, who is not her child but just another orphan, and despite his PTSD and shame, he builds a life with her. But it is a life held back by his demons. He finds work on a mine sweeping boat, along with some ex-military men, when Godzilla reemerges, right after the test of the hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll. This is the bigger, meaner, lazer-breathing Godzilla we are familiar with, having been mutated by the tests.

The world will not help the Japanese with their "trouble" and since they are not allowed to rearm themselves, their only defense is the civilian fleet and a few "loaned" destroyers. Conventional weapons don't do much against this healing-powers Godzilla, who can even recover from a mine exploded in his mouth. But one of Shikishma's crew, a scientist (Hidetaka Yoshioka, Fukushima 50), devises an ingenious plan. They will net Godzilla with freon tanks, which is heavier than water, and drop the lizard into the deepest trench off Tokyo bay. If the pressure doesn't kill him, then the backup plan is a quick use of inflated balloons hoping the explosive decompression will kill it. The endeavour doesn't go exactly as planned, but they do eventually put down the severely injured Godzilla.

But, as Kent tells, the movie is more about the people fighting the creature than the monster itself. Unlike in Shin Godzilla where we got a bunch of people being ineffective, wrapped up in bureaucracy of governments dodging responsibility, here we have a group of survivors who have no choice but to band together, to save their country. They are not blindly defending an ideal, but saving each other. They know their own country's faults caused the greatest disgraces and failings of the war, and the movie presents that acceptance, without the great apology expected of a defeated country telling their own story, but also without the great blame. This movie does kind of reflect how the country processed their role in WWII and its own self-destruction.

But in the end, it still feels like what I have seen of Japanese Godzilla movies from the past -- the melodrama, the ingenuity, the wonkiness of the monster. While this is purely the CGI stomping monster of current years, it still often feels like a guy in a suit, which is probably because the collective psyche of what he should look like demands that. In that aspect, the latest examples of the American Godzilla and this one do mirror each other. Someday, I need to watch the first American one, and the latest (whatever that will be at the time) and directly compare his depiction.

KWIF: Next Goal Wins (+4)

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film where each week Kent has a spotlight movie in which he writes a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else he watched that week, he just does a quick little summary of his thoughts instead of calling his mother. He must have been an evil bebe. 

This week:
Next Goal Wins (2023, d. Taika Waititi - Disney+)
Delicatessen (1992, d. Jean-Pierre Jeunet et Marc Caro - AmazonPrime/the binder)
Nemesis (1992, d. Albert Pyun - Tubi)
Requiem for a Dream (2000, d. Darren Aronofski - the binder)
Tokyo Godfathers (2003, d. Satoshi Kon - the shelf)

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There is a consistent rhythm to the dialogue of Taika Waititi's residents of American Samoa which is not to dissimilar to the rhythm of the Maori denizens of most of his New Zealand films... full of charm, good nature, and prepetual sense of positive optimism. That type of dialogue, and general nature, is something that Michael Fassbender's reluctant, angry, drunken, heartbroken, belligerant coach just is incapable of joining in on. In part because that is what the role calls for, and partly because this type of comedy is definitely not Fassbender's baileywick.

It results in the character of Thomas Rongen, a real life man who was basically left no other options than to coach the worst national team in international soccer/fütböl, taking a very expected white man's journey of learning and growing by embracing a culture other than his own. It's a true-ish story but that doesn't make it any more played out as a story. 

The thing is, knowing exactly what the journey would be deflated almost all expectations of true drama, and so the film  left with promoting the charms of the various actors playing the denizens of American Samoa, and every single one of them seems like someone you would just delight in being in their presence. It speaks to the dark place Coach Rongen had to be in to take so long to embrace it.

Waititi's film isn't a triumphant return to form by any stretch. It's a pretty wobbly narrative, a skeleton of story upon which hangs mere ribbons of characters, most of whom are teased with inner lives, but really none of which are not explored to any satisfaction. Yet it's not the nearly unwatchable mess of Thor:Love and Thunder, which was about as big a narrative and tonal misfire as we've gotten in the past 5 years.

I laughed a lot, and even cried a couple times. When a character explains to Coach the third gender of the island -- fa’afafine -- as a flower that makes our lives more beautiful, that got me real good. It takes Coach a little longer to come around, and given the increasingly crass and dangerously incendiary attacks by political and religious leaders on the trans community as a mode of riling up and distracting their followers from real issues affecting them, it makes for the film's most direly uncomfortable moments. The film takes place in 2011, which in the course of trans awareness was an eon ago, so Rongen at first is dismissive or insensitive or even aggressive about it, before befriending and mentoring Jaiyah (played by the stunning and charming Kaimana in what should have been a breakout role) as team captain, embracing her as its clear her community does.

I can see the editing lines of the film, the truncated drama, the expurgated character arcs, and half-remaining narrative framework in the remnants of Next Goal Wins. What is left is a mostly breezy picture about a group of people aiming for a low-stakes victory and probably being quite fine whether accomplishing it or not. I'm not sure I want to see the no doubt 30-minutes-longer version whose island breeze levity gets dragged down by too much emotional weight.

It's fine! Really!

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Delicatessen is a film I've been meaning to watch for 30 years, and, in fact, have had a DVD of it in the binder for 20 (but, sadly, in another region format).

In an amber-drenched, wet and smoggy post-apocalyptic France, we find amidst the ruin an isolated square where, beneath a tenement house, a butcher shop sells human meat. The meat is sourced primarily by drawing in unsuspecting victims with an ad that promises room and board in exchange for building upkeep labour. The meat's consumers, primarily, are the building's odd motley of tenents.

Enter Dominique Pinon's Luison, an out-of-work clown who starts charming many of the locals (though others don't sway from their meat cravings and keep their distance). Luison makes a connection with the butcher's mousy daughter who wants to save him from his fate. She enlists the rebel Troglodites who live in the sewer to kidnap Luison, and all hell breaks loose in the building.

Until the third act, the film is largely comprised of a series of vignettes that form a picture of the people of the building and a sense of this should-be-horrible world they exist in. Yet Jeunet and Caro inject this bleak landscape with a sense of whimsy and playfulness (accompanied by a winkingly jovial Parisienne score) that undercuts any and all darkness.

It does feel like the film is biding time though to get to its rollicking third act which takes its multi-level set piece and absolutely wrecks it in gloriously practical fashion. It's wondrous to behold and elevates this film from pleasant curiousity to sheer joy.

Jeunet and Caro cast, dress and style their band of actors like human cartoons. You would think given their various exaggerated features they were shot with a fish-eye lens to further accentuate their unique traits, mais non, they are just that fascinating to look at...or at least feel that way given the directors' lovingly curious way of capturing them on film.

This would program well as a triple feature with Kung Fu Hustle and The Shape of Water.

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I was listening to a podcast in which a trio of cult cinema fans (and professional screenwriters all) were nerding out over their love of Albert Pyun movies. Pyun has nearly 50 film directing credits (and a few uncredited efforts), of which the vast majority were released direct-to-video. The most "famous" of his features would be the Jean-Claude Van Damme feature Cyborg, and the not-even-laughably bad Captain America from 1990.

The funny thing was, as big a fan as these commentators were, they still could acknowledge that the majority of Pyun's work was, bluntly, pretty bad, but that the director has a penchant for getting putting a little more into some of his films, and getting a little more out of them, that his DTV contemporaries.

Nemesis was touted as the spotlight film for Pyun's filmmaking zeal, and, to be blunt, it's a pretty bad story about a largely nonsense war between humanity and cyborgs that is definitely riffing on both Terminator and Blade Runner, but having a fraction-of-a-fraction of the not just budget of either, but attention to detail in world building.

For starters, they get the definition of cyborg completely wrong. They call what are essentially sentient robots, "cyborgs" when the lead character, Alex Rain (the charmless Olivier Gruner), a "cyborg" hunter is himself a true cyborg, comprised largely of cybernetic parts. It's a maddening that a DTV genre movie that relies upon exploiting nerds for profit could get this one concept so wrong.

I won't go into the specifics of the story because the filmmakers didn't really seem to care, so why should I?  But within the first 30 minutes, Alex has been nearly killed and rebuilt twice, retired from his job and pulled back into it, and sent on a mission to do assassinate a "cyborg" rebel leader only to switch sides when he learns the truth. It's storytelling whiplash that would be infuriating if there was any sense of a character in Alex Rain at all.  Gruner seems to wrestle with any dialogue (it's clear English is not his first language) and cannot conjure up any sense of emotion. He does look good with his shirt off though, and it's off a lot.  

It's also insane how the film keeps pairing Alex up with characters and then killing the sidekick or companion off. It robs the film of any meaningful relationships for Alex, and pretty quickly you stop even trying to care about anyone that may pop up on screen, even plucky Max... Max Impact.

For as inane as the story is, and as checked out as I was, by the third act I was finding myself charmed by the film's action gusto. As noted, Pyun gets a lot out of his minuscule budget, and manages a pretty relentless stream of action sequences. They are not exceptionally well shot, but there are some clever flourishes amidst them, including one atop a collapsed building, one while two characters slide down a very long and wavy industrial (and very muddy) slide while shooting at each other, and a sequence in which Alex repeatedly shoots the floor out from under himself to descend four stories and escape a trap.

Then there's the big finale which results in Alex fighting a stop-motion robot skeleton which is not something you see anymore and for as silly as it looked, it was twice as charming.

Beyond Gruner, the acting is bad, but due to the script being so awful and the majority of the movie's dialogue being captured in post.  But we get small appearances from Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, the ever reliable Tim Thomerson, a blink-and-you-miss-it Jackie Earle Haley appearance (I didn't even notice), and even a very nude, very young Thomas Jane.

I see the appeal of Pyun's work, but if this is the best of it (as per the podcasters' claims) I don't know that I could stomach anything much further down the quality scale.

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(filed under: horror,not horror)

I was 24 when Requiem for a Dream came out, and it was one of the scariest, most intense, viscerally upsetting films I had ever seen.

I felt scarred, yet I listened to the soundtrack (Clint Mansell with the Kronos Quartet) I don't know how many times. I couldn't brave watching it again however.

So why now? Same thing that triggers most of my movie watching these days: a podcast. The Blank Check crew were stating that Satashi Kon's Perfect Blue had an noted influence on director Aronofski, specifying that Requiem was a benefactor of Aronofski's fandom. I wanted to see if I could pick up on that now, having just watched Perfect Blue a few weeks ago.

But I don't really see it at all. Perhaps I just havn't studied either film enough to really plot the parallels.

Aronofski does have a playful lens and a feathery touch with the editing throughout the film but the playfulness lessens and the editing becomes more intense as the severity of the story escalates. I liked the splitscreening, and doubtlessly the quick cut montage of the heroin process is going to be Aronofski's most lasting contribution to pop culture.

I was sucked in by the showiness early on, thinking that it would allow me to sail unscathed through to the finale but damn that third act, as cartoony as it gets, remains scarring enough to want to wait another 24 years for another rewatch.

Ellen Burstyn is still incredible, Jared Leto is just this side of trying too hard, Marlon Wayans is great but the character gets short shrifted in the story department, and Connelly's performance breaks me. 

Oh, and how had I completely forgotten about Christopher McDonald's TV pitchman? The DVD menu screen only comes up after being forced to watch a minute of McDonald's infomercial, and then it lands on the active "order now" screen where the menu is slyly buried. One of the all-time great DVD menu screens for sure.

But is it horror? Not traditionally, but yes.

---

I can't exactly recall when it was that Toast and Marmy screened Tokyo Godfathers for me, but I would hazard a guess that it was circa November 2005, where I needed to crash on their futon for a week.

I imagine I made it clear that anime wasn't my thing, and they must have made it clear that Tokyo Godfathers wasn't your typical anime.

My recollection of the events and characters of the film was naught, but the impression it had lasted these past two decades. I tried to coax my anime-loving kid to go see the film in the theatre this past holiday season, and they passed. Mainly because I didn't sell it very well. But I was disappointed we didn't go.

I had forgotten that the godfathers were not, in fact, three older, unhoused men but only one middle-aged unhoused man, a slightly younger trans woman, and a sixteen-year-old runaway. I had also forgotten it was, in fact, a Christmas movie, with elements of Buddhism and Shintoism that occur during the same week.

In the film, this rag-tag trio discover a baby abandoned amidst the trash (there is so much trash in this film). Hana, who had just been wishing to have a baby for Christmas, is overjoyed by the miracle. Both Gin and Miyuki think they should take the baby to the police, but Hana, herself having grown up a foster child, implores them to care for the baby, at least for Christmas so as not to forever ruin the holiday for the child. Hana names her Kiyoko.

Left with a bag full of clues, the film follows the trio for a week as they do their own search for Kiyoko's family. Throughout the search, there are numerous incidences of coincidence and happenstance that would feel far-fetched if not for the fact that the film is treading heavily in "the magic of Christmas".  I think many of the coincidences would usually annoy me, but director Kon is so adept at finding themes and meaning that most of the coincidences have deeper meaning for the story or a character, or both.

It is a remarkably compassionate and considerate movie. It humanizes its unhoused characters with great empathy without hiding any of their flaws or blemishes. Gin is a drunk, Hana is an impulsive loudmouth, and Miyuki may have some undiagnosed mental health issues. These traits, along with stubborn pride, seems to be keeping these characters on the streets. Gin, for all his flaws, is riddled with regret over his lost daughter, and definitely sees Miyuki and even Kiyoko (and perhaps even Hana) with that lens. Hana is full of love and affection, and shovels it out to all three of her found family in heavy doses in her own unique way. Miyuki is a scared, lost child, and needs her surrogate parents more than she cares to admit.

On Hana, Kon sort of conflates trans and drag as being the same thing, which obviously they are not. And while Hana is called a drag queen and has a community of drag performers she is a part of, she is very, very clearly a trans woman whom Kon has a tremendous affection for. Hana confidently and unwaveringly identifies as a woman, and her drag home seems to be more a safe place of acceptance.

The "one-crazy-night"-like scenarios they find themselves in are indeed maybe a little wild and crazy, yet still feel grounded. The impulse would be to ask why this is animated, as opposed to live action?  Animation allows the audience just enough distance reality that it demands one accepts and invests more into the characters. Animation makes it easier to live in the discarded world that the Godfathers find themselves in. In live action, we would be too confronted with the unpleasantness of all we throw away, that we discard and don't want to think about anymore. 

The colour tones Kon and his team of animators use for the characters is not vibrant, a lot of autumn tones, but the lights of the city are dazzling, so there's both a dinginess and a shimmer that play off each other. It is a beautiful movie visually and in its soul. I love it, and it's long overdue as part of my holiday viewing regimen.

I have loved each of director Kon's movies so far, but this is the clear frontrunner for me, definitely the sentimental choice. Paprika is going to have to do something pretty exceptional to unseed it (and while I hear Paprika is a mind-blowing exceptional movie, I wonder if the hype is maybe too much...we'll see next weekend).

 [hey, Toasty has a review! Of course we agree!]

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

2024, Gil Kenan (City of Ember) - download

Kent really didn't like the "first" movie. I was OK with it, as I am accepting we are now past the age of the "try something different" requel and squarely in the "pander to the masses" requel era.  I recently rewatched the first, knowing this was coming out, and thought, "You know, I actually kind of like this." Once I divested myself of comparisons and annoyance at retreading already covered ground, its actually a rather fun movie. And again I admired the way the young McKenna Grace handled the very neuro-atypical Phoebe, even more so in second viewing.

Record scritch.

Unfortunately, the now 17 year old McKenna Grace, whose IRL presence is a mix of pop star & IG star, does not so easily transform back into a now 15 year old Phoebe. There is this weird sense of uncanny valley, like she was badly tucking her blonde locks up under the uber-curly wig. I get she is supposed to stay awkward and what is more awkward than an awkward teen, but something was just .... off. AI generated awkward off.

Beyond that, similar to my original watch of the "first" movie, this one left me mainly in the "meh" realm. Sure, it had some fun bits and exciting bits, and the pandering references to the original Ghostbusters movie(s) were OK, but nothing made me gleefully giggle or go, "Oooooooo...." in reaction to something fantastical. Maybe it will improve with subsequent viewings?

So, three years later, the new ghostbusting team is actually a proper ghostbusting team headquartered in NYC, so yeah, in the firehouse. I was hoping for a few more nods to the ... 2016 interim (??) Ghostbusters (also occasionally subtitled Answer the Call) movie, but that's apparently only in my headcanon, as two minutes of research reminds me it was truly a reboot, not set in the same universe, so not even referenced here.

Said Headcanon: Patty was Winston's "niece" (not by blood, just a family friend she considered an uncle) and now that ghostbusting team works for Zeddemore's company of ghostbusting researchers.

The team seems to be surviving it as ghostbusters, got a bit of celebrity but also the ire of the new mayor of NYC, one Walter Peck (William Atherton, Die Hard), yeah that asshole EPA guy from the first first movie. Once again he doesn't seem to be grateful pesky ghosts are being busted, and once again he is annoyed by their use of nuclear devices to hunt & store ghosts. He's not wrong to be worried. Once again, something is up in the world and the almost full ghost containment tank is bursting at its seams. Also, a doofus (Kumail Nanjiani, Obi-Wan Kenobi) shows up with an evil artifact, something connected to his late grandmother and connected to an ancient, otherworldly demon of ice.

Of course, said demon gets released and only the Ghostbusters can stop him/it. Its as much a nod to the original sequel as it is anything. And at this point, I realize I don't really have much to say about the plot of the movie, as it is almost only ectoplasm, its so thin. Essentially the realize that the doofus's grandmother was a legendary protector of the world against the demon, and have to convince him to use his emerging powers to help them. The demon itself is only released when Phoebe meets a cute ghost girl (Emily Alyn Lind, The Babysitter), begins a budding friendship/romance only to be betrayed. Once demon is released, he freezes NYC until the Ghostbusters defeat him.

Meta-Questions! There is a scene where the icey cloud comes rolling in from the waters to freeze people on the beaches... well, no not exactly, this is PG level movie so ... everyone escapes? You would think that freezing an entire city would lead to thousands of deaths, especially considering the ice spikes everywhere. Anywayz, the meta is that this is likely the third time this scene has been done. Prior to this, in GeoStorm and in Kong x Godzilla where icey danger from the waters forces beach goers to run. These two movies have much more deadly consequences. I wonder what's going on in CGI world that they all fell in love with that scene, and I am not going to dig deep enough to discover that maybe the same team did all three scenes?

More meta! Is that actually the original Podcast (Logan Kim, The Walking Dead: Dead City)?!?! How the heck did that kid go from weird, frizzy headed goof to that gangly teen in only ... checks wikipedia ... four years. OK, that says something about my age. That is the exact time in life when people literally evolve from one being to another: ages 12 to 16.

Final meta. Ghosts. Some are human, some are monstrous. Many are in between. Why? What makes for a perfectly human looking ghost vs Slimer? I am feeling Ray (Dan Aykroyd, Pixels) should have something to say about that.

Again, I am feeling I need a rewatch already in order to say anything of value about this movie... no not value, as I have realized that as I churn out more of these posts on an almost regular cadence, that I am not trying for "quality of posting" nor really "quantity of posting" more just getting out what is in my head onto screen. I have embraced the blogging, for better or definitely for worse, and now in accepting, the fate of the blog suffers.

Its also a commentary on your mind of late. Nothing is very often coherent. I mean, you started that last paragraph saying one thing and ... SQUIRREL !!

Watching: Shogun

2024, Disney

We took our time with this one, cuz it was so good. But as it came to a close, without any vast payoff, I realize I don't care -- didn't need that plot payoff. The individual pieces: performances, production values, imagery, are all just so fucking incredible, the plot almost doesn't matter. And yet, if I take the time to think further about it, to absorb and process, that was pretty incredible as well.

I don't recall much about the original series, and while I have the big, fat novel on the shelf, I recall not getting far into it. I was 13 when the mini-series came out, during the full reign of my D&D phase, so anything with swords and battles and armour and mysterious other cultures was My Thing. I was probably lost in most of it, but Anjin probably ended up as a character in a few of my games. But there was one thing I remember -- that the white guy saves the day. Thirteen year old Toast probably was fully onboard with that being the role of white men in mysterious cultures.

But now, I exquisitely enjoy that Anjin (Cosmo Jarvis, Persuasion) is not the white saviour in this show. He is more the vessel in which we travel this unknown culture. And he definitely more pawn that protagonist. He plays a role in almost every major activity in the show, but often he is just a tool being used by one person or another.

John Blackthorne is a ship's navigator on the Dutch ship Erasmus. The crew is starving by the time they arrive on the shores of Japan. They claim to be traders, but Blackthorne definitely has an English agenda, and I am not sure even the crew is fully aware. But the logs show them to be doing pirate things against the Portuguese, and the Jesuits living in Japan want him dead. But the local ruler sees benefit in keeping the boat and its guns available. Still, he is not beyond boiling a guy or two alive to see how these barbarians react.

Meanwhile Japan is in turmoil. The Taikō has recently died, leaving a regency of five rivals. But if anything truly unites the regents, it is that four of them are against the fifth, Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada, Helix). The entire show is about the political machinations in trying to have Toranaga pressured into being a traitor to Japan.

Its a dense show made further opaque (to what I imagine is the general audience; I have no issue with them) by the consistent use of subtitles for the Japanese being spoken. English is sparingly used to substitute for Portuguese, to give us anglos a break. But the subject matter is thick with cultural nods, exquisitely planned out political actions and responses. Everyone has their own agenda, and almost everything plays out with the expected extreme level of politeness and care of a tea ritual. Blackthorne, called Anjin (or pilot) by everyone, spends much of the show flustered & confounded by his lack of ability to control the situation and cultural norms he considers barbaric, and even when he thinks he is manipulating people and situations, he really is just falling under someone else's machinations. And yet, he has heart.

It is the character Mariko (Anna Sawai, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters) who shines the brightest. She is vassal to Lord Toranaga, from a disgraced family he took pity on. She wants nothing more than to die honourably but Toranaga has a use for her, and not just because she is an acting Christian who speaks Portuguese fluently. She is entirely held by honour and custom, a husband who just uses her and family ties and shame that people constantly remind her of. But when Blackthorne shows her unexpected gentleness and respect, a bond is formed.

Even so, my favourite character is the always-three-steps-behind Kashigi Yabushige. He is ultimately in it for himself, willing to betray his lord Toranaga, but also immediately switch allegiances when his enemy's plans fail. He genuinely seems concerned for his family but never gets that he is not doing the manipulating he thinks he is doing.

What did I mean by the lack of payoff? Multi-season arc shenanigans is all. You know Toranaga's goal is to finally reach the capital and take control of the council of regents. Will it be by war? Or by assassination (strangely uncommon aspect considering how cliches of Japanese fiction) ? Or by a mix of politics and honour games? In the end its a mix of all of the above but is not really resolved. All we got was the expected tragedy of Mariko. Will be interesting to see how following seasons play that out for Blackthorne. I mean, I knew it was coming, but really this is a show about the beauty of its parts, not necessarily its whole. But even saying that, the whole thing continues to come together nicely, just not.... unexpected.

Kent speaks.

I think you need a tag for untethered blathering....

Watching: Scavengers Reign

2023, Download

This one is pushing back the Watching tag all the way back to the I Saw This(!!) tag realm, wherein its far enough back that it sits upon my vaguest of recollections.

Scavengers Reign is an animated series created by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner for Max, based on their original short. 

It's like something out of my notebooks, mixed with the artwork of Moebius and an old comic by Paul Chadwick called The World Below, which itself was a throwback to Challengers of the Unknown comics, and not least, inspired by Studio Ghibli's amazing wide shots. How did I mix myself into all that? A number of my vignettes are about space travel and survival on strange worlds, but it felt like something I could have spun off into during one of my dream influenced stream of consciousness writing sessions. 

The interstellar cargo ship Demeter 227 is heavily damaged and much of the crew escapes in pods that fall down to an unknown, uncharted planet Vesta. Most pods are destroyed. An unknown time later, there are three groups of survivors: pilot Sam and Ursula, on a journey back to the damaged Demeter which they program to land from orbit, Azi and robot Levi who have learned to live with the strange environment, and Kamen, initially trapped inside his pod, high in the trees, but then freed by a strange telekinetic creature and they become co-dependent.

The other main character of this story is the planet itself, and its ecosystem. Everything about this planet is bizarre; it just teems with life, but life unlike anything we would know. Much of the strangely relaxing show focuses on depicting how that various creatures of the planet interact with each other, and the human interlopers, and their technology. It often feels like a nature show, where you watch a beautiful interaction between rain and wind and plant and animal, except there are tentacles, and massive walking towers, and parasitic bugs, and carnivorous beach balls, whirly gigs and countless blobby things. Normally scifi is sparse in its depiction of ecosystems, usually smattering our experience with a few things, like a bug on a leaf, or a wolf-creature they have to run from. But Vesta doesn't have a human-like species to knock back the wildlife, so its utterly over-full with life, dangerous and wondrous.

The show is a road story, as the three "main character" groups converge on the fallen Demeter. There are a smattering of other survivor stories, but they exist to ... well, be devoured or killed by the planet. Like Australia, something that will kill you is around every bend. There is an underlying mystery to be solved -- what caused Demeter to become so damaged -- and there are human, and robot, stories to tell, but really, I was there for the planet.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): My Name is Vendetta

2022, Cosimo Gomez (Ugly Nasty People) -- Netflix

Or Il mio nome è vendetta.

Was in the mood for a revenge flick, so clicked Add to My List on a few from other countries. This one is from Italy.

It would be nice if more of these movies decided to establish some style, instead of just watching a few dozen of the better know examples of the sub-genre and doing a low-res copy & paste. Everyone wants to be the next Taken or John Wick but most are pale imitations. Giving the young girl a haircut straight out of Leon does not make this a Luc Besson movie -- leave him to his own terrible movies.

That is my way of saying that the movie is not very good, not very innovative, just a serviceable example of the revenge/retribution genre but from Italy. But I have been thinking about the act of creation, and once again going back to Kent's comment about intent. All the choices here are definitely intentional, they are just not very... thought through far enough. But, I think, that's OK? I create: I write here, I write spontaneous flash fiction in my notebooks, I take photos with a higher end point & shoot and post them to my decades old blog site. And in all, I call myself tenaciously amateur. I am willing to create, but only willing to invest so much into it. I don't expect myself to excel, so I don't really try. And that's OK. The act of creation is what I am doing, for myself, and occasionally, like you five fine folks, for an audience. So, the writers and directors of these middling movies are... doing this as well? Sure, there is a business and lots of meddling Purple Suits in this mix, but sometimes I think the creatives behind the movie are still doing their best with what they are given, and the act is worthy unto itself. A lot of people get to do their thing when a movie is made, even a bad one. And that's more than OK.

Uh, so what about THIS movie?

So yeah, the movie.

Santo (Alessandro Gassmann, Transporter 2) lives in the woods in northern Italy with his wife & daughter, and his beard. They are in an isolated area but not off the grid. But Santo has secrets, which are revealed when his daughter Sofia (Ginevra Francesconi, Regina), celebrating a day with him after a win at hockey, snaps his pic (something he always forbids) and posts it online. Within hours, their house is broken into, Santo's wife and her brother, are murdered and Santo & Sofia are on the run.

Santo was a thug for a mafia. He killed a mafia Don's brother. Then he met a girl and ran away, to mend his ways, and his soul. But now that he has been revealed, and they have taken his wife from him, he will end things.... finally, and permanently. 

This one is by the books, paint by numbers, a text book example of how these movies go, cookie cutter. There are things about running on rails plot that bother me, for example, when the Good Guy breaks into the Boss's mansion, why is it always so... easy? Sure, there are always the requisite number of goons in the way, to be shot, strangled or blown up, but eventually he finds the Boss just sitting there. But sure, that is what I have been saying... there is just enough effort, and part of it requires giving the audience what they expect, what the genres have told them they want to see, the easily digestible template. And that's OK.

Santo was a solid (literally, for a man over 50) lead character, rough and tough looking, especially after doffing the beard and hair for the serviceable shaved-down look. He is capable but not a Wick-ian superhero. His daughter has to run the gamut from idyllic life, to denial and rage, to final acceptance and... well, as we know how these go, to sequel-ish revenge.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Drive-Away Dolls

2024, Ethan Coen (True Grit) -- download

This is the first non-brothers for Ethan Coen. Its still very Coen-ish, which then lumps it squarely into That Guy territory. Do I need a tag for That Guy?

No sir, no you don't.

That said, I just did a search for the combination of words, and it has two distinctive uses on this blog: one is the painfully repetitive reference to a time period when I considered myself a movie buff, and also a reference to those recognizable faces in movies, whose names often escape memory. Even if I don't do a tag, it might be fun to do a ReWatch series of That Guy movies. And maybe find some movies from the same time period that I should have seen, but didn't for one reason or another?

Anywayz, enough rabbit-holing.

Yeah right.

This was a weird movie, a quirky little thing that was both off-putting and very charming. But other than No Country for Old Men that pretty much describes all Coen Bros movies, no?  So the same and different when lacking one Coen?

In an alleyway outside a bar, Santos (Pedro Pascal, The Great Wall) is murdered for the briefcase he has chained to his wrist, and he is beheaded in the attack. Kind of extreme. Meanwhile Sukie (Beanie Feldstein, Lady Bird) kicks girlfriend Jamie (Margaret Qualley, The Leftovers) out of her apartment for cheating on her, so Jamie  decides to join her friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan, Blockers) on a trip to Tallahassee, Florida in a drive-away rental car -- the idea that a rental car has to be driven from A to B, so you get... a reduced rate? The thing is that the car was supposed to be picked up by a representative of some shady characters, but the girls showed up instead. Something is in the trunk of the car and the shady characters want it back.

Of course, that's the bland story bit. The real Coen (brother) thing is the characters. Marian is repressed, sedate and nervous. Jamie, with her over-the-top hillbilly accent, is the opposite -- free, excitable and all about the casual sex. The girls are friends only. The gangsters are loquacious and constantly badgering each other. The rental agent is peak Coen mumbly. What's in the box ... er... trunk is hilarious and off-putting.

Don't you want to tell them?

I do want to tell you "what's in the box", and you can probably guess... half of it. You see, there is the wrist-chained briefcase and there is a head hat box. The former is key to the story, the MacGuffin everyone is chasing while the latter is just incidental. But...

Just go ahead and tell them!

OK, the case is full of dildoes! Big rubber schlongs! You see, there are these weird transition pieces in the movie, all 60s psychedelia and ... is that Miley Cyrus? Apparently she was some crazy lady who slept with emerging people of power, drugged them just enough so she could do a casting of their members. And that case of dicks has been used as currency (Santos was a collector) and blackmail evidence against the now powerful said people, including right-wing Xian Senator Gary Channel (Matt Damon, The Great Wall). The goons chasing the case are his goons and he wants his facsimile penis back before it can be revealed to the world, which would no be good for his Whitehouse run.

Of course, the girls now ... cough... empowered by the use of the senator's manhood foil his plans and reveal him to the world. And run away with the bribery money. And another copy. Marian has finally admitted she is attracted to Jamie, despite their opposite end personality spectrums, and is very forthright about her fondness for the instrument of pleasure. Jamie is willing to explore the idea of commitment -- insert joke about moving in together. There are some weird things being said here, such as, why are all the "men of power" so well endowed? Why is a realistic penis replica so attractive to a pair of lesbians? But the entire movie is sex-positive, and doesn't judge anyone, and is also sort of a commentary on the foibles of repressing who you really are.

It was OK, not as ground-breaking as the Bros used to be, but fun, and quirky, and well done.

KWIF: The Fall Guy (+5)

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film where each week (uh huh) Kent has a spotlight movie in which Kent writes a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else Kent watched that week (or maybe a month ago and forgot about) Kent does a quick little summary of my thoughts. Just not in third person.

This Week:
The Fall Guy (2024, d.  David Leitch - in theatre)
Millennium Actress (2001, d. Satoshi Kon - the shelf)
Witness (1985, d. Peter Wier - the binder)
Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (2023, d. Guy Ritchie - AmazonPrime)
Clear and Present Danger (1994, d. Phillip Noyce - the binder)
Blackhat (2015, d. Michael Mann - the binder)

---

I don't know if I can really write a longer, thinker piece about The Fall Guy because it doesn't seem like much thought was put into the film itself. 

I'm being rude. 

The Fall Guy was a film I actually had a good time with, largely based on the explosive and almost effortless chemistry between Emily Blunt (Gnomeo and Juliet) and Ryan Gosling (Young Hercules) -- two extremely attractive people that look even more attractive together. Do Eva Mendes and John Krasinski need to be worried? Or at least extremely jealous?

This film is director, and former stuntman, David Leitch's love letter to stuntmen and stunt crews, wrapped in an action rom-com. Leitch over the years has proven his action-directing chops with Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, Hobbs & Shaw, and Bullet Train. Each of those films may not have the greatest of stories, but the action tends to be really fun. 

And the action is fun here. There's a great "tripping balls" fight in a nightclub, and a swing arm garbage truck chase/fight sequence through the streets of Sydney that strive to stand out. I think the problem with post-John Wick action-heavy films is the action is too heavy and so nothing really stands out, and the same goes here.

What's more, I found the fact that we were watching a lot of stunts from the perspective of a film crew, seeing all the cameras and cables and tracks required, which was necessary as part of the film's narrative, but it ruins the illusion and lessens the impact of the stunts (most stunts, really, should inspire at least a bit of awe, but we've seen and know too much now, and they've become a little commonplace, undervalued).  I do appreciate that Leitch lets everyone in on the action, with the welcomed, if under-utilized Stephanie Hsu and Winston Duke each getting a sequence of their own, and Blunt reminding us she's more than capable of throwing fists when needed.

As a crime/mystery story, the more it reveals itself, the dumber it gets. It's a real nonsense plot which requires an acceptable amount of suspension of disbelief to start with (the star is missing, Colt is asked to discreetly track him down only to find a dead body and have things go even more wrong for him from there. But there's no real world logic to how wrong it gets, and the more you pick at it, the more it bleeds. There's only so much belief I could suspend and this stretched it to its breaking point.

What eventually made my suspension of disbeleif snap, though, was the film-within-a-film. A sci-fi epic called "Metalstorm" that looked, at best, like a sequel to Battlefield Earth. It looked like a mid-budget remake of the Barry Bostwick 80's b-movie Megaforce. This film would have you believe it was the next Dune or Star Wars, and it just looks like trash. The Fall Guy is a pretty good looking film. It really needed "Metalstorm" to look incredible, or play into it being B-movie action trash, not say it was an A-tier movie, but look like B-tier trash.

As a romcom, this is aces. I was in for every sleepy and/or doe-eyed stare that Colt and Judy give each other. Their dialogue was charming, funny and seemingly effortless in its delivery, and that split-screen sequence was terribly cute. Gosling and Blunt, all day, every day.

---

Watching Perfect Blue last week felt like a revelation, like there was a piece of cinematic language missing from my vocabulary all these years which I now understood. Millennium Actress couldn't compete with that type of lifting of the veil.

It also didn't help that I just wanted to sleep the entire time it was on. 

I didn't fall asleep, though, which is a testament to how engaged I was with it (I did fall asleep while writing this post).

Once again director Kon proves his mastery at the transition and edit. Where Perfect Blue was a Giallo-tinged suspense thriller, Millennium Actress is a romantic drama that, all at once, tells us a character's life story and steps us through seventy years of Japan's cinematic history through which we get a staggering sense of Japanese history.  Let me tell you that as a viewer having a very limited amount of knowledge of Japanese history -cinematic or otherwise- it does this film a disservice.

The story is of a studio executive and a young cameraman visiting a famous, but long-retired, reclusive actress to interview her after the demolition of the studio of which she was a big part of building. The exec, who you would expect to be forceful and entitled, is instead a gushing fanboy with nothing but the utmost respect and reverence for the actress.  He presents her with a key which the actress thought lost years ago, and the totem unlocks a lifetime of memories.

The actress recounts her birth, how she was discovered by a producer, her first film, but also her encounter as a teen in the 1930s with a young artistic rebel whom she helps escape by shielding from the law. She is instantly smitten by him, a soulful artist, and the key was a gift from him which she was made to promise to return to him, what became her life's mission.

Her real life blurs into her acting roles as she describes them. Like Perfect Blue the transitions between real life and her acting are seamless and, at times, difficult to discern.  Her roles, or at least the ones that matter to her in retelling her life, are the ones of a young romantic longing for an unseen man who she desperately wants to find. The roles step through the eras and genres of film, from samurai to geisha to Kaiju to sci-fi.  All the while as she recounts her blurred story of life and work, the producer and cameraman are present in the story, the producer injecting himself into roles in the films he clearly knows so well. It turns out, he was a young production assistant during her later films at the studio and was, once or twice, a part of her story.

It's a surprising film in how down to earth it is. It is a film that deceptively seems like it should have been live action, but to have the actress span the ages she does is almost impossible for a single performer, and to have the scale of adventurous productions in her repertoire would make for an expensive film.  Plus, I don't know that any live action director alive has a handle on seamless transitions like Kon.

---

For four years I had an art teacher in high school who loved Peter Weir films, and would play them in class while we were toiling away on our sketches. I've seen Dead Poets Society, Green Card, and Fearless numerous times. Of the three, only the latter did I actually like.  If you look at the release dates of those films, you can tell which years I went to high school (accounting for the delay between theatrical and home video release). I don't know why, if he was such a fan, we never saw The Cars that Ate Paris, Gallipoli, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Mosquito Coast, or Witness.

I have just assumed all this time that I'm not a Peter Weir fan. And I'm not. But I've spent some time thinking I'm opposed to Peter Weir, and, after watching Witness for the first time, it turns out I'm not. 

Witness is a surprisingly patient movie from an era of filmmaking where its action movies were increasingly bombastic and its thrillers were full of sex, violence and cliches. This lacks almost any bombastic action, and there's no sex, an anti-violence message, and its cliches are tossed out the side of the horse-drawn buggy. 

It's got plenty of Amish. And I thought this story of a police man protecting a young Amish boy (Lucas Haas, Mars Attacks) who witnessed a murder would be full of crude, reductive stereotyping of the community instead places Harrison Ford (Working Girl) as Captain John Book within the community where he is largely respectful of its traditions, keen to help out, and even finds a bit of peace while he's there. 

He also starts falling for Rachael (Kelly McGillis, Stake Land) the boy's mother, but also keeps his hands to himself, respectfully remembering they are people of two very different worlds.  There is an intense attraction between the two of them that just builds until, following the climactic conflict between Book and the bad guys, deflates like a balloon. The scene of Rachael looking out her window to see Book chatting up his police pals by their cop cars, smoking a cigarette, it is just an incredible moment that reinforces the gulf that separates the two of them. The thread of attraction that seemed to grow inot a bridge made out of stone turns out to just be a wispy thin thread.

Along with the film's climax -- where Weir, instead of delivering that oh-so-American release of catharsis and shooting up the bad guy instead ends with an appeal to his humanity -- proves the director isn't interested in the most satisfying ending for the audience, but the one that feels most real.

This is a pretty great movie, held down by a drone of a score that might as well not have been there at all, and one of the most awkward impassioned kissing scenes I've seen.

---

One of the dumbest titles in recent cinematic history, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre finds Guy Ritchie delivering a script with plenty of charming flourishes, and leading a cast where everyone seems game (even Jason Statham (The Beekeeper), well, at least for the first 20 minutes where he flirts with the idea of adopting a character before he falls back into default Statham mode). 

Josh Hartnett (Halloween H20) does that "proof I can be funny" supporting role mid-life crisis thing that modern actors have done since Tom Cruise appeared in Tropic Thunder. He's good, and handsome, and, yes, funny playing a pompous, pampered superstar actor (if we're comparing, he does a better job than Aaron Taylor Johnson in the same role in The Fall Guy).  Aubrey Plaza (Ingrid Goes West) sometimes feels like she's in the wrong movie, but I would watch that movie. Cary Elwes (Robin Hood: Men In Tights) gets some good cracks, and Hugh Grant (Wonka) genuinely seems to be enjoying himself. 

There is that odd take in the elevator with Hartnett where Grant breaks after barely delivering his line... which speaks to one of the larger problems of this film: it feels unrefined. There's a lack of care, and certainly a lack of flair to the overall production. It doesn't look great, it looks barely a cut above, say, Burn Notice or some other action TV series. This obviously wasn't a cheap movie, so why then does Ritchie's work on Netflix's The Gentlemen TV series look so much better? The editing here proves serviceable but we've been so locked into the idea that Ritchie movies are highly stylized, that this largely doesn't feel like a Ritchie movie. 

Ritchie already did his take on Bond with Man from U.N.C.L.E., while this feels like his riff on Mission Impossible if it were done by Asylum. It's certainly inessential to his repertoire.  I think the director just likes to work, he's found a mid-range groove and he's maybe going to coast there for the rest of his career.

---

The third entry in the Jack Ryan "series" (and the second with Harrison Ford [Cowboys & Aliens] in the role) finds Ryan becoming embroiled in the "War on Drugs". The PotUS's friend is found murdered alongside his whole family, the culprits being the Cali Cartel. The President wants swift retribution, under the guise of the War on Drugs, and discreetly has his national security advisor run an off-the-books operation to take out the head of the cartel.

When Ryan's friend and mentor Admiral Greer (James Earle Jones, Conan The Barbarian) falls ill, Ryan takes his place as Deputy Director of Operations in the CIA. He is dispensed to Columbia to try and find other means to cutting off the supply chains to the US.  He petitions Congress for more funds, and Congress agrees so long as no military engagement is enacted. Little does he know he is set up to be the fall guy for it.  

The film is a pretty taut political thriller that falls apart only with a jingoistic third act that finds Ryan single handedly going to Columbia to bring back the soldiers left behind by the NSA.  It turns into a ridiculously out-of-place rescue-the-POWs action sequence that neuters the political intrigue that had been the film's raison d'etre up til that point. 

The finale of the film finds Ford's Ryan dressing down the President ("How dare you, sir!") by holding the most powerful position in the land to a standards of decency and responsibility that have absolutely been abandoned in the past decade. It's perhaps the most upsetting (and unintentional) note of the film.

---

In the past dozen years of massive disastrous box office performances, Blackhat still stands out as one of the biggest bombs, recouping under 20 million of its 70 million dollar budget.  

It's not just that the film tanked at the box office, but it was both critically and socially derided at the time. That beautiful brick wall of a man, Chris Hemsworth, Thor himself, playing a nerdy master computer hacker. It was laughable in its very conception.

But a funny thing happened in the years since, the Michael Mann fans have managed to drown out the knee-jerk reactionaries and get the film into a "reclaimed" status. Certainly the podcasts and socials I feed into have been saying as such for a couple years now.

Having seen the film (then forgetting to log it) I have to say, bluntly, not bad. In fact, good. Not great, certainly flawed, but good.

My biggest gripe with the film is how Mann shot it.  It's a film that puts Mann in Steven Soderbergh mode, using a lot of different types of digital cameras and lenses and I found jumping between them quite distracting.

The film begins with a nuclear power station melting down. It was hacked and the cyberwarfare arm of the People's Liberation Army want to find the culprit. Captain Chen (Leehom Wang) of the division aligns with the FBI in the US, needing genius-level hacker (and his college roommate) Nick Hathaway freed from prison in order to sniff out whomever was capable of such an attack.  A subsequent attack on the stock market only exacerbates the need to find the culprit.  

It's a pretty taut globetrotting cyber-thriller all told. It takes some tense and scary turns as it leans into just how reliant we are upon technology, and just how vulnerable that technology is to malicious interference.

I can ignore the sketchy accent, and I can even buy into Hemsworth as a hacker, but how did Hathaway get so adept at knife fighting and shooting guns? There was a lot of nonsense in the film, questions raised and never answer, but I still just rolled with it and enjoyed the ride.

I had just watched Decision to Leave the night before watching this, so I was pumped for more Tang Wei and this did not disappoint in that regard. Loved the cast which also features Holt McCallany and Viola Davis.

Watching: 3 Body Problem

2024, Netflix

Quickly, I am realizing, as I put in more of these one-shot TV writeups, that there was a reason why I left so many shows to mega-posts, where I would breeze through a number of shows, to catch you all up. Its hard to write about a full season of something coherently. Maybe Kent's 1-1-1 format is what I should lean on? Maybe.

I have been hearing about the novel this is based on, for forever. Every time I would try to read a synopsis of the book(s), I would get lost in the deep plot and then very bored. It did not sound like a story for me. There was no "catch" that would draw me in. But I thought that D&D did a decent job of distilling the massive amount of world-building content from A Game of Thrones into a watchable TV show (until they diverged from the books) so maybe they can do the same here? I was right. It was definitely watchable, and is actually inspiring me to attempt reading the book. Maybe.

Note: I don't intend on following the "surprising reveals" nature of the book and story, so SPOILERS ABOUND.

So, it is a show set in a couple of timelines. We have seen that done before. They don't try to do the fakeout here, just establish that the real story has been going on for a long long time, all the way back to The Cultural Revolution in China, where a young Ye Wenjie (young: Zine Tseng, debut; older: Rosalind Chao, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) watches her father murdered on stage , because he is an intellectual. She is conscripted into the military where, because she is a brilliant scientist in her own right, she is brought in on a secret -- that the Chinese Govt has made contact with an alien species who live in a system with 3 suns. She is cautioned by a distant alien to not provide details as to the Earth's location, for its people will come, and not be friendly. She is angry and despondent at what her world has done to her; she contacts the aliens.

In current times, science is starting to fuck up. Commonly known laws of physics are breaking all on their own. And scientists around the world have been killing themselves. Clarence Shi (I wish IMDB would not list the book character's name; Benedict Wong, The Martian) is investigating things for... some sort of independent organization, under the watch of Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham, Safe House). Meanwhile a group of friends (who are all science types) are caught up directly in it, as one of them commits suicide and another, Auggie Salazar (Eiza González, Godzilla vs Kong), starts seeing the impetus for it -- a countdown clock is forever in her vision, counting down to who knows what, but a mysterious woman gives her a warning that if she completely shuts down her nanofibre company, and destroys all its research, her clock will disappear.

It is this group that the TV show centres around, as they each become more or less directly mixed up in the conspiracy at the centre of it all --- the aliens who are on their way, but will take 100s of years to get here -- want us to desist our scientific breakthroughs. They are a race that while having been around for a VERY long time (they have space travel) they also live in a star system that is regularly almost destroyed, knocking them back "to the stone age". They want Earth for themselves, but know that humans, given a couple of hundred years, will find ways to defeat the aliens. So, they sabotage us before then using all kinds of super science.

The show was well paced, as I already mentioned, and distills all the Big Ideas in the books down rather well. The trouble remains, I just am not sure I care about much of it, which kind of weirds me out -- this is supposed to be the kind of scifi that excites me. There is a subplot about a magic level VR game system that is using human players to help them solve their astrological issue, the titular "3 Body Problem" wherein the three stars in their system regularly destroy their civilization. The game is supposed to supply a way for them to survive. But the whole idea just left me .... flat, uncaring. And the whole story of a woman who survives the Cultural Revolution only to get mixed up in a cult that is welcoming the aliens, providing a message they will be benevolent "pet owners" until she learns the aliens would rather squash us like bugs. This whole storyline was supposed to chilling and cautionary. But again, I was left unaffected and more annoyed by all her choices.

One story did keep my attention, a simple human story about one of the group of friends, Will (Alex Sharp, How to Talk to Girls at Parties) who is dying of cancer. He ultimately doesn't care about what's going on in the Big Wide World, as he won't be around much longer. While he doesn't play a direct part in anything, he does inspire so many of his friends to make better choices, as they are directly mixed up in all that's happening.

In the end, I enjoyed watching the show, but like Kent mentioned, its not likely to memorable or even the remotest rewatchable. When, and if, a new season comes along, I will watch, but will not rewatch to remind myself. I just didn't end up caring that much, but I am keen to see how it goes.

We Agree.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Courier

2019, Zackary Adler (Casual Encounters) -- Netflix

Why do I watch these movies? Easy to digest? Familiar plots so I can spend part of my time looking at my phone? Time wasters? They are not often BAD bad, or boring enough to turn them off, or terrible enough to watch gleefully, so just continue to be middling. And with the occasional diamond rising from the depths of the dross.

Maybe you need to make THAT a tag?

Part of me actually wants to turn the watching of these middling movies into a Kent-style Project wherein I pull them apart at the seams and comment on how design, structure and execution of movies that take just enough effort & money to produce, but don't care to have any passion for the product. But to do so would require effort, and research, and front-lobe thinking that suggests I have the mental energy to do all of the above, but if you revisit the first paragraph, you can see I don't. If I had that energy, why wouldn't I just give it to watching actual GOOD movies?!?!

He doesn't have any real answer, you know that, right?

Ezekiel Mannings (Gary Oldman, Leon)  is a crime lord under house arrest in NYC awaiting trial... by video for some reason. In London, a courier is given a last-minute package to deliver under a strict deadline. On her motorcycle, in her super sexy leather, she flies to the secret location where a witness will testify, hinting that this single act will put Mannings in jail for all the crimes he normally gets away with. 

The courier arrives with the package -- a fancy, schmancy Zoom webcam contraption, but SPOOF (!!) it was all a setup!! It releases a gas and one of the FBI agents (yes, FBI in London) betrays her fellows and lets everyone die. And tries to kill the courier. She is supposed to be killed in a hail of gunfire, a patsy. The witness happens to be hiding in the bathroom when the room fills with poisonous gas. Little did they know The Courier (we will capitalize her now; Olga Kurylenko, Oblivion) was actually a very capable ex-special-forces-type ex-soldier that easily survives the attack and escapes with the witness. BUT they are trapped within the parking garage by Bad Guys and chained doors. Thus begins a bottle episode or "locked in a room" episode; whichever trope you want to ascribe to it. Good thing this is one of my favourite tropes.

Again, note how much easier it is write these posts when you can mock them?

So, what happens next is what we expect. She fights off the Bad Guys, most often one at a time, sometimes two until it comes down to the Boss Battle. Initially the witness is a pain in the ass, but eventually he sees this stranger is here to help him, and is incredibly (and mysteriously) capable. Surprisingly, they allow The Courier to have some humour in her reactions & responses to this very violent altercation. Sure, heroes in these movies are supposed to be quippy, but usually Kurylenko is relegated to very sombre roles. Anywayz she shoots or stabs everybody to death and saves the witness... barely.

But we cannot comment on this movie without talking about villain Mannings played by Gary Oldman in suuuuuch a terrible terrible role. He is supposed to be Eastern European menacing with his black leather, scars and eyepatch, sitting around his home all day in a dressing gown, intimidating the Agents assigned to watch over his house arrest. But his character is very video game background Boss Bad Guy, but never really actually does anything but act menacingly. I mean, the whole act that they are going to convict him (and apparently end his crime empire reign) was a single shooting of a single person, by his own hands. Booorrrrring. Most Evil Bad Guys would not be bothered by a single murder conviction, either running things from a posh country club jail or arranging to have the conviction overturned on a technicality. Instead, he arranges a very complicated corruption & betrayal by FBI agents willing to kill their own for money.

Oh, and one final Bad Guy nod. The interim villain, another betrayer character (Interpol? FBI? MIsumthin?) is trying to run the "kill the courier!" activity from a security room, talking to her over the PA system and yelling at other Bad Guys to "SHOOT HER YOU FOOLS !!" He was a lot of fun actually, constantly popping pills and washing them down with booze, doing his best to soothe Mannings anger that the job was still not done. You could just feel his frustration, in his constant whining, "This was supposed to be an EASY job betraying everyone who trusted me; she is she screwing all this up for me?!?!?!"

So, in the end, did I enjoy myself? Was it worth watching? What does the shoe-gazing voice say?

Yes, that's me.

Yeah, kind of. Its a cut above the usual dross. Its executed decently. It provides exactly what its meant to provide, but does not go above its station. But it still makes me wonder what it takes to go to the next level, to become the next John Wick, to not just be sold to Netflix amidst a long list of other movies called The Courier. I don't have the answers; maybe when I do The Project, I can do some research.

Riiiiiiight.

Also, what's with the novel you write about THIS kind of movie?

Watching: Death and Other Details

2024, Disney

We watch a lot of whodunnits and crime series, in general preferring the week to week procedurals, particularly in the light British style (as opposed to the grim Broadchurch-ish shows). When I say we, I mean Marmy for the most part, but I have the ones I will wander in and sit down for. There is one particular style choice of such that I ascribe to adaptations of Agatha Christie, more accurately, movies of such in the last decade or so, that is as much about the styling of the period piece, as it is about the ensemble cast murder investigation. Think the Branagh Poirot movies and how pretty they look. Only Murders in the Building is something I would shoehorn into this category; Knives Out as well. This series, which came out of the blue for me, is another.

At its heart, it is a whodunnit, who stuck the intolerable American guy to the wall of his cabin with a harpoon bolt. Also, at its heart, it is the entire season unravelling of an older murder, that of Imogene's mother, when she was a child. But the entire show is wrapped up in the decadence of wealth, real and fabricated, it taking place on a luxury cruise ship built by (false) magnate Sunil to appear authentically as an ocean liner from the .... 1920s? And all the guests seemed to have got the note, and dress to fit the part. It knows it is doing this, for the show opens quickly, not explaining to us what is going on, causing confusion and wonderment, as anachronisms appear and then are accepted.

I loved every pretty moment of it. Well, most. I am never one for full on commitment to anything. Its been a while since we finished it, given it was a week-to-week show on Disney, which is rare these days. The thing about doing a season long whodunnit, as opposed to a single-episode-per-murder is that you have stretch things out. False leads, false solutions, double-turns, twists, conspiracies, and twists. And twists. 

When Imogene Scott (Violett Beane, God Friended Me) was 11 her mom was car-bombed in the driveway of her uber-rich boss Lawrence Collier (David Marshall Grant, Air America). "World Famous Detective" Rufus Coteworth (Mandy Pantinkin, Criminal Minds) was brought in to solve the case, and promises Imogene he will. He doesn't and she is devastated. Years later Imogene, having been raised by the Colliers, is on a luxury, anachronistic, period piece cruise with the Colliers and a bunch of other uber rich people. The primary reason is to negotiate the merger of the Collier family business so that Lawrence can retire, and his daughter take control. The murder interrupts that action.

Initially Coteworth steps up to take over the case, with Imogene loathing him every step of the way, but also recalling all the investigative methods Rufus instilled in her when she was a child. Then an Interpol agent arrives to take over the case, and Rufus reveals the murdered man was secretly his assistant, who was helping him trace leads from the original Collier case, hoping to reveal who actually murdered Imogene's mom.

Yes, the twists & turns are typical fare for this kind of murder-mystery, but they were all handled decently well. And migawd, this was a pretty pretty show full of lovely sets, incredible costuming and Imogene's perfect coif. I fully admit to swooning over Imogene's bright blue eyes for much of the show. By the time we were on our third twist, I realized I wouldn't be able to seriously commit to the "oh, but did you expect THIS !?!" aspect of the show, but everything was handled so artfully I forgave it of it's Lost-isms. And no, by using that comparison, I don't suggest there was something supernatural at play; it was all summed up via human greed, and evil and desires to take or keep power, like all good murder-mysteries do.

Notice how this write-up suffers from the old Toasty style of "i liked it, all done" lack of anything of substance to say? You should have really talked more about how pretty it was, like Mabel Mora's outfits from S1 level pretty.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Kill Room

2023, Nicole Paone (Friendsgiving) -- download

My habit of late is watching trailers: on YouTube, on Plex, on IMDB, etc. If something perks my interest, I usually grab it when its available for download. And yes, I know that these middling movies usually end up on streaming at some point, maybe a year from now.

Patrice (Uma Thurman, Batman & Robin) runs a not-currently successful gallery in NYC. She's part of the art world, deeply embedded in the nonsense lingo you see written on those cards next to the art. She also does a lot of drugs and since sales are down, she owes him money. She gives him an unsellable piece of art instead, and that gives his boss Gordon (Samuel L Jackson, The Hateful Eight), or The Black Dreidel, an idea. Gordon, who runs a bialy bakery (polish "bagels", generally lacking a hole), cleans money for mobster Andrei, but their front shops have been getting caught and shut down. But galleries sell nonsense for vast amounts of money all the time, and since Patrice has a money problem, they could work together. His enforcer Reggie (Joe Manganiello, Magic Mike) will make the art, Patrice will log it on the books, Andrei will "buy it" and Patrice can cut them a check. Clean money. Exceeeeept, Reggie's art gets noticed, and Reggie actually gets into it.

This is a middling, enjoyable, crime caper movie. It starts off rather weak, the characters are all rather paper thin, but once it gets up and running, once Patrice embraces the art work of The Bagman (Reggie kills people by suffocating them with bodega bags) and genuinely sells it to her clientele, it becomes kind of engaging. Kind of. This is not high quality by any means, which of sort of sounds like I am justifying enjoying it, but sometimes just seeing fun things play themselves out, where the actors are not phoning it home, makes a story rewarding. For me, the weakest part remained the satire of the art world. Sure, most people think art is all bullshit, that anything can be art, and considering we live in the world of NFTs, who can blame them, but it would have been nice to see at least one artsy fartsy say, "Wait, this is a joke right? We are actually considering it art?"

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Civil War

2024, Alex Garland (Annihilation) -- cinema

The post was started right after we saw it.

Ugh, my stomach still hurts. This movie had me anxiety ridden from almost the first moment. As a man who watches a lot of violent media, often as comfort food, and plays very violent video games, often as a relaxation mechanism, I was rather surprised how I reacted to the constant anticipation of very realistic violence, to something that seemed plausible. It was not a pleasant feeling.

And I believe that was the point of the movie.

One of them?

America is at war, with itself. Not the metaphorical version we are IRL, but a civil war. Texas and California have seceded, Florida breaks away (allies? on its own?) and the rest of the US is at war with them. It is not an isolated war, not one with clear lines. It is everywhere and everyone is affected. Who are the Bad Guys? Who are the Good Guys? This movie is not here to answer that for you.

You're ALL the Bad Guys, even the quiet motherfuckers who just sit quietly by and watch all this shit go down !!!

Lee (Kirsten Dunst, Bring it On) and Joel (Wagner Moura, Elysium) are war correspondents, journalists covering the war in their own country. They don't take sides, they just go where the action is and report on it, Lee with her camera and ... Joel writes? They are in NYC, suffering water shortages, brownouts and suicide bombers, but they want to get to Washington, DC to interview POTUS (Nick Offerman, The Last of Us). Despite the President's rhetoric, this seems to be the final days of him being in office. They want that story.

Tagging along is Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson, Dune): veteran reporter, old, overweight, walking with a cane, and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny, Priscilla): in her early 20s, but looks much younger, and softer and very very naive. The movie opens with Lee saving her from a bombing. But Jessie wants to be a war photographer like Lee, her hero, with her vintage film cameras and know-nothing attitude.

Its about a 1000 miles from NYC to DC by way of older highways and back country roads, because the interstates have been destroyed. A thousand miles of unknown danger. Their trucked labelled with PRESS and their badges are only expected to protect them so much. And in DC, "they shoot journalists on sight."

I am not sure if it was the anticipation, like I mention above, or recent latent anxiety I have been supressing of late, but it was tangible to me, the ache in my gut. In a lesser movie, the chosen music, style of filming, the mannerisms of the characters, would have set this journey as an adventure, instead of an ordeal to be survived. But here we get well-built characters: Lee, the world-weary photographer with the same name as another famous war photographer who suffered extreme PTSD after her WWII experiences, and Joel, seemingly unphased by it all, drinking, smoking, hitting on much younger women, and Sammy, who is tired of taking chances, and knows its all bullshit. And Jessie, young, scared, but very much assured this is the life she wants, hero-worshipping Lee and her namesake, not afraid to push past her fear to take the shot, but also so prone to stupid stupid moves. 

I feel I was aligned with Lee: she was upset at her own country doing what she had spent her entire career trying to caution them from doing, she was tired of atrocities, tired of scary little boys with big guns, and the people in power who just let it happen. She's doing what has to be done, but looks for the quiet moments, instead of finding herself in the key centre of action. Until that becomes impossible for her.

Part of what elicited the anxiety, extracting itself once again from lesser movies, was the sound design. From that first boom of the suicide bomber's explosion, which is less the familiar boiling rumble, and more the sound of a sledgehammer, to the sharp, angry retorts of gunfire, to the deafening din of helicopters at the staging ground, this was not your average action flick. These are the sounds that make you cringe, startle, not feel adrenaline and excitement.

What is Garland saying in this movie? Its obvious, and its not obvious. For those who walked out of the movie because its not the exciting, travelogue action movie of some of the deceptive marketing done for the movie, the clear cut "look at Americans doing right by their country, doing The Right Thing" is not there. Oh, there are hints of a side being chosen here, in that we hear about "the Antifa Massacre" and wonder what was so horrendous that it inspired Texas and California to ally against DC, but for the most part, we don't even know what side the soldiers we meet are one. When the journalists come across a battle between a small cadre of uniformed soldiers holed up in a university, while a handful of irregular looking, civilian clothing wearing, soldiers hunt them down, which side is which? Are the uniforms members of the Western Front and the un-uniformeds fearless locals defending their home? Or are the uniforms the standing army of the US while the un-uniformeds are just those who picked up arms to help fight the civil war? We see war crimes from "both sides" but most often, we don't have a fucking clue which side is which. Again, scary little boys (and girls) with big guns getting the opportunity to shoot at each other. Like Kent mentioned as we walked away, a strong comment in this movie is about the US being a country with a lot of guns, and its just itching to use them, on anyone, including each other.

The movie ends as the civil war is brought to an end, by an action we have seen in a couple of other movies, with the White House invaded. Where those movies were about the invading forces being very clear Bad Guys, and the brave men & women within the White House were defending America, this movie steps sideways, and this act seems more like a street action from any other war movie. But again, more visceral, more scary. The handful of secret service people and supporters are defending against a large force of heavily armed, highly trained soldiers. It also ends with Jessie becoming who she wants to be, getting the award winning shot that will be on the cover of Time Magazine, but at a cost she probably won't understand until she is Lee's age.

I liked this movie, a lot. It dragged me out of my usual comfort zone, or more accurately heightened my already severe discomfort zone? It made me feel things, for reasons more than my usual work drama. Unfortunately, all it left me was feeling bleak. I don't see the movie as much of an exaggeration of the US situation. The possibility of Americans killing Americans, almost gleefully, seems very real. And scary AF.

Kent: We Agree.

I really dislike most of the posters for this movie, not because they aren't evocative, but because most are deceptive. The movie doesn't take place there, that is not really what the movie depicted. And that's not even mentioning the incredibly terrible AI generated posters highlighting major American landmarks being destroyed.